Scrapple For Breakfast - My First Attempt

[Kitharode]

It seems that there are more recipes for scrapple than there are parts of a hog. A quick google will take you to one that takes your fancy I'm sure. Having just had a go at making (and eating) my first scrapple I'm sure you won't be disappointed if you give it a go. I've a feeling there will be a good few forum members who are already scrapple fans and maybe they'll add there own twist to this dish.

I got my recipe from "The Food Journal of Lewis & Clark - Recipes For an Expedition" (by Mary Gunderson) which is one of my favourite campsite books. My ingredients weren't exactly the same but it didn't seem to matter too much. My plate tells the story.....

 

[mrcharly]

Sounds very similar to the inside of a haggis.

 

[Toddy]

Y'know ? if haggis, scrapple, etc., didn't taste good as well as being good food, it would have disappeared into the annals of history by now. Yet our local supermarkets, (all seven varieties of them) are awash with haggis just now. They're even selling venison haggis !
Bottom drawer of our freezer is Himself's meat drawer, it's half full just now of haggis, black pudding, venison sausages and white pudding. It must be that time of year.

Scrapple, haslett, ponhoss
(This is a link to a quilting site I 'follow'; the lady and her family are modern Mennonites, and they butcher their own hogs, I posted it on a thread earlier too.
http://quiltingal.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/butcher-day-and-quilt-projects.html )
black and white puddings and the like are classic foods of agricultural communities. One of the few things that's carried over really well into suburban life.

I don't eat meat, but I cook it for my husband. New recipes are always interesting.

M

 

[Big G]

Where's the bottle of

 

[Kitharode]

Where's the bottle of View attachment 43350

Just out of shot alongside the cayenne pepper, smoked paprica, tomato sauce.......

 

[Big G]

Just out of shot alongside the cayenne pepper, smoked paprica, tomato sauce.......

I hope you smothered a good few dollops of the stuff on

It was crying out for it

 

[baggins]

Mmmm, looks good. However, being a southern mediterainian type (coventry), could somebody explain exactly what Scrappie actually is.

 

[Kitharode]

Hiya Baggins. It's hard to say exactly because there are so many variations to scrapple/ponhoss/haslett or whatever it is known by at different times and in different places. My understanding is that it was a way of using up pig offal, or leftover cuts, or the pigs head (often complete) by cooking it with cornmeal or similar with flour and maybe some herbs. The idea being to produce a porky, mealy, herby loaf, which was allowed to set and then sliced and fried in hot oil. The Lewis & Clark book mentioned earlier says that scrapple was traditionally served with fried eggs.

Like I say, that's just my understanding of it. Like a lot of recipes in this vein, what you had to hand would often dictate what came out the oven. Anyway, I'm loving my version and had some again today. The rest of the loaf is sliced and in the freezer. Happy days.

 

[Kitharode]

If you want to give it a go here's what I did:

Ingredients: 1lb pork shoulder, 1 large onion (sliced), 6 cups water, 1 cup milled oatmeal, 1 cup wholewheat flour, salt/pepper/herbs/spices to your taste.

Method: Put pork, onion, and water in a big pan. Bring to the boil, then simmer till pork is tender (mine took 70mins). Remove pork to plate, remove onion and discard. Shred pork with two forks, then put it back in the broth (water). Stir in the oatmeal, stir in the flour, stir in the herbs/spices and bring back to the boil. Reduce heat and keep stirring till the mix gets really thick. Take off the heat and spoon the mix into a loaf tin (mine was 9"x4"). Cover it, fridge it overnight. Done.

Slicing it was a bit tricky 'cause my loaf was a touch moist, so I just made sausage-sized wodges and fried them up. Takes about as long as sausages to fry. Good luck ... and good eating.

 

[Janne]

Interesting dish, reminds me of the Swedish dish pölsa.

Oldfashioned food is so tasty, respectful for the animal and usually simple ( but timeconsuming) to cook!

 

[Toddy]

Pressure cookers are absolutely excellent for cooking meat for such dishes though. They'll reduce a lot of the otherwise unedible stuff to gelatine too, and that helps set things like potted meats, as well as making truly excellent stock for soups, gravies and sauces.

M

 

[Janne]

My favourite 'old' dish is headcheese done the central European way, but as I can not get pigs head I use Pigs Trotters and Cow Foot for the gelatine and flavour and pork meat for the meat.

I will try cooking this English Pölsa (Scrapple) next week end. Looks good!

 

[Toddy]

My Grandpa's favourite was a singed (as in singe-d) sheeps heid. Basically the butcher saved the sheep head and it was roasted over flames. The hair was burnt off (the singeing) and the whole thing roasted in the coals. The brains cooked inside the skull which was neatly cracked open with a hatchet. He ate them with a horn spoon, and maybe a wee bit of black pepper. The meat picked off the rest of the head didn't go to waste either.
He lived healthily until his late nineties so it didn't do him any harm.

It stank though as it cooked and Granny wouldn't let it be cooked in her kitchen, he had to do it outside. If he singed it and scraped off the skin though, she'd bake it or pressure cook it for him however.
None of this not knowing what your food was or came from. No plastic wrapped wee trays of tidy and hygienically portioned meat then.

Not a chance of doing it nowadays, the brains and spines are not permitted into the food chain after the BSE issues.

M

 

[tombear]

Got a pound of pork mince in Lidl just now so going to make either scrapple or haslet tomorrow. Probable haslet if I can get my head around the whole soaking cubed bread in milk thing.

ATB

Tom

 

[woodstock]

Pressure cookers are absolutely excellent for cooking meat for such dishes though. They'll reduce a lot of the otherwise unedible stuff to gelatine too, and that helps set things like potted meats, as well as making truly excellent stock for soups, gravies and sauces.

M

Can you still buy potted head or hoogh not sure of the spelling but bells of Lanark used to sell it in wee tubs, we would have it on toast or tattie and neeps loads of pepper.

 

[Toddy]

You can indeed. Every independent butcher makes and sells it.
http://www.scottishrecipes.co.uk/pottedhough.php
http://www.scotlands-enchanting-kingdom.com/potted-hough.html

 

[oldtimer]

My Grandpa's favourite was a singed (as in singe-d) sheeps heid. Basically the butcher saved the sheep head and it was roasted over flames. The hair was burnt off (the singeing) and the whole thing roasted in the coals. The brains cooked inside the skull which was neatly cracked open with a hatchet. He ate them with a horn spoon, and maybe a wee bit of black pepper. The meat picked off the rest of the head didn't go to waste either.
He lived healthily until his late nineties so it didn't do him any harm.

It stank though as it cooked and Granny wouldn't let it be cooked in her kitchen, he had to do it outside. If he singed it and scraped of the skin though, she'd bake it or pressure cook it for him however.
None of this not knowing what your food was or came from. No plastic wrapped wee trays of tidy and hygienically portioned meat then.

Not a chance of doing it nowadays, the brains and spines are not permitted into the food chain after the BSE issues.

M

I can see why you are a vegetarian!

 

[Toddy]

Oh me too
Usually the meat they ate was roasts or stews, though Grandpa liked gigot chops.
But, I have, and can, make haggis from scratch. The most repulsive bit of the lot was boiling up the sheeps lungs in a pot, with the trachea hanging over the side into a bowl….that was so that the gunk and mucous in the lungs would boil out and leave only the meat to be chopped up small. You have to remove the trachea and the first inner tubes though, because they stay tough…like the heavier arteries coming out of the heart when you bake that.
Some folks like those chewy bits though; one of my friends, Tara, insists that the giblets of the chicken are added to the soup because she likes sooking the meat and juices off those wee bones.

You have no idea just how glad I am just now that I am vegetarian…..and how utterly horrified that my Grandparents would be that I was !

M

 

[tombear]

I"m rather chuffed with myself as the haslet came out great. The three who've eaten it so far say it's better than the bought stuff which is most gratifying!

i did take a pic but for some reason I can't get it to go on photobucket from this iPad. Anyroad, having looked at several receipts I decided to do it this way.

400 grms lean minced pork from lidl as it was a lot cheaper than ASDA, 4 posh Tescos sausages to make it to over a pound. 6 Oz of Polish bread crumbs, 2 smallish red onions chopped up very, very fine, a heaped cap full of dried sage, most of a teaspoon of salt, a heaped teaspoon of coarse ground pepper, one large egg to bind. Well mixed and compressed into a well greased pound bread tin.


Cooked for 2 hrs at gas Mark 3 and a bit, top of the oven. I put a silver paper lid on it after 1.5hrs. The house smelled lovely whilst it was cooking and we were drooling by the time it came out of the oven.

We've had it slightly warm still in sandwiches and supper will be thick slices fried with bacon, eggs and beans.

ATB

Tom

 

[Toddy]

Guess there'll be a rash of fireside dinner photos popping up in due course….featuring haslett and scrapple then

M